Ok, after 18 months of japanese study and likely some amateur studies of how linguistics works (I also research a bit of how linguistics works for fun and because I was hoping it will help learn faster japanese).
I can now answer why the fuck every english translation is dog shit and why japanese may be untranslatable to english.
Light novels don't have awful translations, they're usually quite good.
The issue is deeper and harder to explain.
The core issue is that the writing system of japanese puts hardcore mental memory limits into the active vocabulary a japanese people could basically recall from memory and write from memory.
This puts social and cultural incentives to default to a core vocabulary of 3-5k words they use for pretty much anything.
Again, doesn't mean is their passive vocabulary or that japanese don't have as many words as english.
Is their active vocabulary which caps on average to 3-5k.
So japanese is basically a language where the vocabulary used is quite small, but because humans have a natural need for comunicating and expressing themselves, japanese has developed a system of particles they use to give contextual clues, and also give a wide range of social relationships and emotional context to the same basic word.
The same basic word in japanese would have a radical emotional and contextual meaning based on just using a diferent particle, or some clever lack or wrong, or just regional diferences into how they use particles
Since particles has no proper way of being translated into english, pretty much the contextual meaning and expressive value of a light novel will be lost
Since most anime translators, likely don't have a degree in creative writing, they are unable to properly convey the meaning into a translation, they lack the skills to properly write a pretty english sentence
But since likely this is localization, we can assume americans to be just bad
It's also why japanese is really bad being translated into english by machines
